Monthly Archives: October 2014

1. Purpose
Our overall goal was to create a logic circuit that turns on the air conditioning in a car if 3 specific input conditions are true: the driver is sitting, the weather is hot, and the door is closed.
Also, we wanted the car’s lights to turn on or off depending whether the area around the car was dark or light.

2. Sensors used:
Pressure Sensor: This sensor was used to determine if someone was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car.
Temperature Sensor (Thermistor): This sensor was used to determine if the air inside the car was hot.
Angle Sensor (Potentiometer): This sensor was used to determine whether the driver’s side door was open or closed.

3. How sensor signals were combined to compute desired result:
The air conditioning in the car would turn on if and only if someone was sitting in the driver’s seat, the air inside the car was hot, and the driver’s side door was closed. The car’s lights would turn on if and only if the driver’s side door was closed and the area around the car was dark.

This design challenge happened on the Friday before Family Weekend. Our challenge was to build a human powered trebuchet to throw a glow-in-the dark golf ball as far as possible. Before the challenge, I did come up with a design. After presenting it to my team, our team decided that we were going to implement my idea.

However, we encountered many problems during implementation process. We kept changing ideas. We had trouble connecting pieces of our trebuchet together. Two hours passed without anything done.
After we found the nail gun, the situation changed. We work very effective in the last one hour and we managed to finish our trebuchet on time.
We launched our trebuchet, but it did not worked so well. Nonetheless, we had good time that night finish our first trebuchet ever.